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Saturday, September 7, 2013

Montreal - Hasidic Council Candidate aims to bridge divide between city and its Hasidic heartland

For years, Montreal’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic minority built
a reputation as an insular, nearly hermetic community, shunning contact with
its secular neighbours in favour of rigidly pious lives.

Now, however, an unlikely figure is breaching the
community’s walls. At a time when Quebec is plunging into a maelstrom over the
place of religion in public life, a 24-year-old Hasidic woman named Mindy
Pollak is running for office. She is seeking a borough seat for the opposition
Projet Montréal party in Outremont, trying to reach across the divide in a
district long marked by tensions between Hasidic Jews and their neighbours.

“It’s really revolutionary,” Ms. Pollak said. “But if we
focus on what we have in common rather than what divides us, then we can work
toward solutions.”

Her candidacy marks an unprecedented step for a fast-growing
community that almost forms a city-within-the-city. The Hasidim have their own
schools and groceries, speak Yiddish, and the men wear full beards and long
black coats like their ancestors in 18th-century Eastern Europe.

Ms. Pollak is stepping into the political limelight as the
Parti Québécois government seeks to defend Quebec’s secular character by
limiting expressions of religion in the public sphere. Although she wears no
visible symbols of her faith, the Hassidim are regularly used by some media to
illustrate the isolation of religious minorities from the mainstream.

She is also breaking the mould within her own community –
testing the bounds of a patriarchal system in which women are largely confined
to the shadows, tasked with a religious duty to show public modesty and care
for households of five or six children and more.

A member of the Vizhnitz sect who lives with her parents,
Ms. Pollak faces unique challenges on the hustings. As a Hasidic woman, she
cannot shake the hand of a man who is not a relative; some men will not even
look her in the eye. Nor will she campaign on the Sabbath, from sundown Friday
to sundown Saturday.

One evening recently, when the temperature in Montreal hit
28 degrees and many women around the city resorted to short skirts and
T-shirts, Ms. Pollak campaigned door-to-door in a below-the-knee black dress,
thick white stockings and a long-sleeved shirt. The outfit conformed to
religious requirements that Hasidic women appear in public with covered knees,
elbows and collarbones.

While Orthodox Jewish men have served on municipal councils
in Montreal, Ms. Pollak is the first Hasidic person to try to get elected.
(Before running, she sought and obtained the approval of Montreal’s chief
rabbi).

“Frankly, I have never heard of a Hasidic woman going for
electoral office elsewhere,” said Ira Robinson, an expert on Hasidism and
interim director of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia
University in Montreal. “This is something new, and it’s quite significant.”

Ms. Pollak, whose four grandparents all survived the
Holocaust, works in a beauty salon and speaks fluent English, French and
Yiddish. She became involved in civic life after a proposal to expand a Hasidic
synagogue near her home on Hutchison Street was defeated in a community
referendum. In the fractious aftermath, she forged a bond with a non-Jewish
neighbour and co-founded Friends of Hutchison Street.

Yet her emergence reflects signs of deeper shifts within the
Hasidim. Prof. Robinson said divorce is more prevalent than it used to be, and
the Internet is playing a growing role in many homes. “There’s an awareness
within the community that things are changing,” he said. “It cannot survive in
isolation.”

There have been several flashpoints for conflict in
Outremont, a well-heeled district that is also home to Quebec’s intelligentsia.
In a high-profile case, a local YMCA caused an uproar after frosting over its
windows at the request of a neighbouring Hasidic synagogue and religious
school, which wanted to spare its male attendees the sight of women in skimpy
exercise clothes. And Outremont banned street processions after a confrontation
with a borough councillor during the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Ms. Pollak is running in a district within Outremont with a
high concentration of Hasidic families. Several seem buoyed by her candidacy.
While she was out campaigning, Hasidic women surrounded by broods of children
came out onto their front stoops to greet her warmly, many expressing pride and
words of encouragement.

Eli Herzog, a Hasidic man pushing one of his six children in
a stroller, said the community needed someone to speak for the Hasidim, whom he
felt were misunderstood. “From the outside we may look closed, but it’s not
true. We think we are open-minded and we know what’s going on out there,” Mr.
Herzog said. “It’s important to have someone to voice our opinion and place it
in front of the electorate. It took a woman to go to the next step.”

Ms. Pollak’s biggest challenge, however, will be to win over
her secular neighbours. And one candidate opposing her, Pierre Lacerte, is
well-known for his acerbic blog postings insistently cataloging alleged transgressions
like zoning violations by the Hasidim. In one posting, he sarcastically
describes the Friends of Hutchison Street as “pseudo neo-Gandhis.”

To Ms. Pollak, the solution to local rifts rests in
dialogue. Conflicts arise from “ignorance, fear and misunderstanding, a fear of
what is different. We all share the same values, deep down.”

Her goal is to make peace between the Hasidim and other
residents. But she’ll need the backing of voters of all backgrounds on Nov. 3
if she wants to make history.